February 22, 2018

Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now

President
Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering
fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable
to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our
democracy.

That
is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money
from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally
own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while
he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian
intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually
believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent
of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s
own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

In
sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or
he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible
yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems
highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to
respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a quiescence that is
simply unprecedented for any U.S. president in history. Russia is not
our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring
it all.

Up
to now, Trump has been flouting the norms of the presidency. Now
Trump’s behavior amounts to a refusal to carry out his oath of office —
to protect and defend the Constitution. Here’s an imperfect but close
analogy: It’s as if George W. Bush had said after 9/11: “No big deal. I
am going golfing over the weekend in Florida and blogging about how it’s
all the Democrats’ fault — no need to hold a National Security Council
meeting.”

At
a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller — leveraging several
years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. — has
brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian
groups — all linked in some way to the Kremlin — for interfering with
the 2016 U.S. elections, America needs a president who will lead our
nation’s defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral
democracy.

What
would that look like? He would educate the public on the scale of the
problem; he would bring together all the stakeholders — state and local
election authorities, the federal government, both parties and all the
owners of social networks that the Russians used to carry out their
interference — to mount an effective defense; and he would bring
together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective
offense against Putin — the best defense of all.

What
we have instead is a president vulgarly tweeting that the Russians are
“laughing their asses off in Moscow” for how we’ve been investigating
their interventions — and exploiting the terrible school shooting in
Florida — and the failure of the F.B.I. to properly forward to its Miami
field office a tip on the killer — to throw the entire F.B.I. under the
bus and create a new excuse to shut down the Mueller investigation.

Think
for a moment how demented was Trump’s Saturday night tweet: “Very sad
that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida
school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time
trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no
collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

To
the contrary. Our F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A., working with the special
counsel, have done us amazingly proud. They’ve uncovered a Russian
program to divide Americans and tilt our last election toward Trump —
i.e., to undermine the very core of our democracy — and Trump is telling
them to get back to important things like tracking would-be school
shooters. Yes, the F.B.I. made a mistake in Florida. But it acted
heroically on Russia. What is more basic than protecting American
democracy?

It
is so obvious what Trump is up to: Again, he is either a total sucker
for Putin or, more likely, he is hiding something that he knows the
Russians have on him, and he knows that the longer Mueller’s
investigation goes on, the more likely he will be to find and expose it.

Donald,
if you are so innocent, why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to
try to shut Mueller down? And if you are really the president — not
still head of the Trump Organization, who moonlights as president, which
is how you so often behave — why don’t you actually lead — lead not
only a proper cyberdefense of our elections, but also an offense against
Putin.

Putin
used cyberwarfare to poison American politics, to spread fake news, to
help elect a chaos candidate, all in order to weaken our democracy. We
should be using our cyber-capabilities to spread the truth about Putin —
just how much money he has stolen, just how many lies he has spread,
just how many rivals he has jailed or made disappear — all to weaken his
autocracy. That is what a real president would be doing right now.

My
guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something
about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They
may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son
Donald Trump Jr. from back in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty
disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” They may own our
president.

But
whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so
naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper
defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our
most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep
his compromised status hidden.

That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.